Hello all, Vesna posted an interesting link to an article on the RIPE Labs article about diversity from a while back. Feeling inspired, I decided to look at the numbers a little bit more. Updated numbers --------------- I have extended the gender measurements to the current RIPE 76 registered attendees. Attached find a couple of graphs, as well as the spreadsheet used to make them. The first graph looks pretty grim, but the second one extracts out a more hopeful message. I also took the liberty of making a projection with the matching polynomial trend line... if that continues then we would expect to see gender parity at RIPE 99 or so. On the one hand needing 12 more years before we have equal attendees at the RIPE meeting seems really long. On the other hand it could be considered a hopeful trend. And of course, this is all just numerology, not based on actual underlying issues! The GitHub repository for this work was updated to include RIPE 76 and fix the usual broken data scraping caused by cosmic-ray induced changes to the RIPE web site. As far as the code, I've also started to look at the names that genderize.io is unable too guess, and manually add a few of these to our program. For earlier meetings this is somewhat effective, although it will be harder for later meetings as we have more attendees. So far every name added has been a man's name, so the estimated numbers will look less diverse after this correction; depressing but as scientists we must try to discover the truth not what we want to see. I'll publish new results when I get further along. RIPE DNS working group ---------------------- RIPE is not just about people showing up. The leadership as well as the presenters are very important. I decided to look through my own working group, the DNS working group, and see how we have done with presenters over the years. The RIPE web site lists presentations from working groups going back to around RIPE 55. I could probably troll through mailing list archives to find older agendas, but for now I decided to limit the research there. The highpoint for the DNS-wg was at RIPE 72, with 5 presentations by men and 2 by women. In the 19 other RIPE meetings since then, we have had 1 presentation by a woman in 4 other meetings... all other meetings had exclusively men on the stage. Total presentations: 192 Total presentations by women: 6 We also had 4 panels, of which 3 did not record the participants and 1 was an all-men panel, or "manel". It's not a good look for the DNS-wg, and I'll be talking to my co-chairs about what we can do to improve our diversity going forward. Cheers, -- Shane
